.t 'I l /1 t//!/f . fr "t''':1 / l' 0>' \.. P ;, I, f. ./", ' I' $ , : ., I; J' '/r ,, '. , ::Jf -í /' / ,f . '. j 1.'1' ,I. *" ' " / t "',f ' l ,-li .'f' .I; t.,. 4 é" '#"otl$; :;f ,-1'-6./ ' , A,!,,,,,,' -I .4; rf:" ,t , > /,,: ..:,. / ' II< " .{ 'II . '.>' . ,{': , ,,;:1 } t, : It l f,>l1 ;,:( , ! J 68 , ttt .' .4 . r ; , pß . ' Y tt '; '-. 'Ñ <> 5w '''% *$ . @'^) ':t..;' :, . .... t ) I " .......:. 4.:- , :, ......' , ,.'. 't , :,ç; Æ.. ;p ' þ ..: < ;'" '* \. ...... '" . "'" *- '", '.". *- .:-=-:. <to' .. . (' /; )' 0:: 10. f .: þ'. A Y, J' '< f\f" f "".^. . 'S 1/} . ,/ j /' .... '" , i ,.." >} 1-. 4 '/ t .-'" .. $ \ ^;. . < ' ,; ..:'t . 'l l I y f J > -4 ..<: -:.Ã J<' . ' ".. ''< , ',*, f ' or.: "':;.;} . f( , \ tt' it, "Ø /' J ... :: * 4! :.:' oQo ;.. ,4 <: "I pointed you out to my wife at the airport yesterday I Mrs Stout. That knit travel thing you had on from Abercrombie & Fitch looked sensa- tiona I. Gives you the perfect look of motion. I Whipcord textured Du- Pont DACRON@ polyester. By David Crystal. Beige or black. 8 to 16. $40. 45th Street and Madison Avenue. ... î ... . .-. .-. . . . 1La!J (t \ k, IlU J iJ ...... from Tamil children. But as yet, to anyone observing them on the roads around Ooty, It is obvious that this is not so, for their appearance is striking- ly different. They are much as they were in the attractive old colored prints of the hill station, which often include a T oda man in the toga-like unstitched garment of coarse honlespun cotton, edged with a heavily enlbroidered red or blue border, that is stil1 worn today, standing on the grassy slopes surveying his buffaloes with his wife, her long corkscrew ringlets shining with a lib- eral anointing of butter, and one or two babies squatting meekly besIde hinl. f\S in the world of birds, the female of the species is dingier than the nlale. T oda men dre notIceably taller than the other Ooty dwellers, and many of them are extremely handsonle. They have strong features that would look good on a coin, finely shaped heads with long jet-hlack hair, and curling beards. Both sexes have long, slender hands and feet. The women spend hours massaging their feet with ghee, cutting the nails, and perhaps having them enlbellished wIth a little tattooing in a blue T oda snake pattern; a pret- ty foot with fine, prominent ankle hones is the most admired of feminine charms. \Vhen the T uda nlen stalk along the country roads twitching their mantles around them, the effect is startlingly patriarchal, and one remembers one of the many ingenious theories propounded by scholars about thenl-that they may be a Lost Tribe of Israel, to account for a slightly aquiline cast of counte- nance that might he considered He- braic. Who are they, and wh ere did they come fronl befare they settled here, out of all India? There is an- other legend, quite without founda- tion, that they are descendants of the noble palanquin bearers to the kings of Kandy, who fled to South IndIa from Ceylon following a palace revolu- tion. Or, according to others, they are descended fronl stragglers among the Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great, or they are the remains of an ancient Roman colony or of an early Scythian invasion of India. \Vas not a Ronlan gold coin turned up when the foundations of a new house were heing dug in Ooty in 1828? It had probably been brought up to the hills bj a tribesnlan who had adventured as far as the Malabar coast, where it might have been carried in the dhow of an Arab trader, but other coins have been found from time to time by ar- .<,' . ' Ñ At J:J/ cheologists. The most general theory, however, is that the T odas were part of the main Dravidian streanl of India that retreated south from the con- quering Aryans, and were perhaps driven by some unrecorded event or persecution to take refuge in the spirit- guarded heights of the Nilgiris. The still baffling conundrum of their looks and physique has heen explaIned, rea- sonably enough, as the long, cunlulative effect of their cahn life in the superb aIr of the hIns. They are, in fact, the first ad vertisenlents for the famous san- atoriunl of Ootacamund. According to the Portuguese nlan u- scnpt preserved in the British Muse- um, rumors of the T odas got through to the plains at the he- ginning of the seventeenth cen- turv. The first Roman Catholic bishop of the Syrian Christian conlmunIty in South India, a Portuguese prelate nanled FrancIsco Roz, was told that there were villages up in the savage unexplored country where the inhahitants were saId to be Christîan- they were a renlndnt, it was thought, of the Syrian followers of St. Thonlas when he was in the south-though these strayed sheep had not been bap- tized or taught. A priest called Jacome F erreiri, one of those intrepid clerical travellers whose journeys for God opened up many parts of the East and the Near East in that century, was dispatched with a party in 1602 or 1603 to take the \\1 ord up into the hills. Father FerreIri left Calicut, where he lived, and was gone for nlany nlonths "Then he returned, in a sonle- what exhausted state, he wrote an ac- count of his travels. He and his nlen had crossed wild, mountainous country full of tigers, elephants, and other fero- cious beasts. .A..s they struggled higher, the cold filled them with horror, used as they were to th e stednlY tempera- tures of the Malabar coast. (Even the early Victorian British in India con- sidered that the sharp air of the hills would probably he fatal to constitutions dccuston1ed to a hot climate.) They stopped at a .village called Manarecate and bartered thenlsel ves some warm coverings. Then, at a point which ap- pears to have been about twelve miles south of where Ooty stands today, F er- reiri met his first T odas. .A..stonishment was doubtless mutual. There were per- baps a thousand of the peaceable sav- ages, he guessed. Telling his porters to open up the baggage, he distributed pieces of lookIng glass and hanks of thread anlong the women and sat down to talk with the heads of the